How to add Google Analytics to WordPress

Google Analytics is an indispensable tool for website owners, as it gives you valuable information about your website visitors, how they interact with its pages, website evolution over time, and so on. In this article, you will learn how to add Google Analytics to WordPress, and how to easily integrate it into your dashboard.

Why should you add Google Analytics to WordPress?

The first thing you should focus on after building your site on WordPress is driving traffic, and keeping track of your site statistics to make sure that you are heading in the right direction. Google Analytics provides you with a set of important statistics about your site and your visitors, the most important of which are:

1. Traffic sources

Adding Google Analytics to WordPress allows you to find out which geographic regions your visitors come from. This will help you improve your content strategy, marketing and advertising plans.

For example, if you sell products or services on your website, and you see that a large percentage of your visitors belong to a specific country, focus on that country and make it a priority, whether in marketing plans, or when distributing ads. And you should take into account the popular payment gateways in that country.

And if you see that a large percentage of your visitors come from a region or country that speaks a language other than Arabic, then perhaps it is time to turn your site into a global site by making it multilingual.

2. Visitor behavior

With Google Analytics, you can know what your visitors are doing on the site, the pages they visit, the visitors' bounce rates , and other important statistics to track the performance of the site.

These stats will help you improve your site, see which pages and articles are trending, and which articles are not popular. Helping you to improve the content displayed on the site. If you see that your bounce rate is high, it could be an indication of a problem on the site that you have to deal with.

3. Where do the visitors come from

One of the most important statistics provided by Google Analytics are the traffic sources, which show you the sites that the visitor came from. When someone clicks on a link from an external site, that site is called a referral site. Referring sites could be regular sites, they could be social networks like YouTube, or they could be search engines.

Knowing your traffic sources is very important for evaluating the performance of advertising campaigns, promotional plans and SEO. If you invested in advertising on Facebook, you can check whether these ads are attracting you traffic by looking at the number of Facebook referred traffic. If you want to verify the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, you should follow the number of visits coming from search engines, especially Google.

4. Browsing devices

One of the advantages of adding Google Analytics to WordPress is that you will be able to find out what devices your visitors use to browse your site. Are they using computers, mobiles, or tablets?

This statistic is very important, and you should pay attention to it. If you find that a large percentage of your traffic comes from mobile phones, then you will have to prioritize mobile in website design and user experience. Why not build an app if that will improve the user experience, or you want to offer services offline.

How to connect WordPress site with Google Analytics

- To activate Google Analytics on WordPress, you need a Gmail or Gmail account. If you do not have a Google account, you can create it from here . Then go to the Google Analytics page .

- Click on the "Free Setup" button. You will go to the Google Analytics account creation page. You will be asked to enter the account name.

- After entering the account name, you will be asked to enter the details of the site you want to add Google Analytics to .

- You will then be required to enter other data related to your business activity, statistics and analytics that you want to measure with Google Analytics. Select the options that suit you and click the "Create" button .

- After registering your account and entering the data, you can now add Google Analytics to WordPress from your dashboard directly. There are several ways to install Google Analytics on the WordPress site, the simplest of which is to use the MonsterInsights add- on to add Google Analytics to WordPress. More than a million websites use this add-on, and it is also free.

- Go to your site's control page, go to Add-ons> Add New, and type MonsterInsights into the search box as the picture shows .

- Install the plugin, then enable it. After activating the plugin, go to Insights> settings, then click the Launch setup wizard button .

- A new window will open to help you add Google Analytics to WordPress. First you have to choose the type of site  .

- In the next stage, you will be asked to link your account to Google Analytics .

- The MonsterInsight add-on will ask you for permission to access your account, this is necessary to import your account data into Google Analytics. Then it will ask you to choose the site that you want to link to Google Analytics, because Google Analytics allows you to track more than one site.

- From the list, choose one of the sites you added to Google Analytics and then click the "Complete Connection" button .

- The MonsterInsight plugin will link your chosen site to Google Analytics. In case you don't find the site you want in the dropdown list, you can easily add it from the Google Analytics dashboard.

- Go to the "Admin" tab in the control panel and click on the Create Sites button .

- Enter your website address in the text box, then click the next button .

- Select site options and settings .

- After linking to the site, a new page will appear for you to complete the link. This page specifies the connection settings, and the data you want to track. For example, you may want to track the number of file downloads, or you may want to track affiliate links.

- You can also decide who has access to Google Analytics reports. If you are not sure of the options you want, skip this stage. You can settle for the default settings, or modify them later. Just click on save and continue .

- You will then be asked if you want to install some paid plugins that give you advanced features. You do not need these plugins to add Google Analytics to WordPress, so you can skip them. Click on save and continue .

- You will then be asked if you want to install the WP Forms plugin to create forms and surveys. If you wish, install it, and if you wish, click the Skip this Step button.

- That's it, you have been able to add Google stats to your WordPress site. The best feature of MonsterInsight is that it allows you to access Google statistics via the dashboard directly from WordPress, without the need to log into your Google Analytics account.

- This will take away a lot of the hassle, and make it easier for you to keep track of your site stats. To view Google Analytics reports, go to Control Panel, then Insight> Reports, and you will see a set of important statistics about your site.

- The MonsterInsight extension does not display all of the Google Analytics data, but only shows the most important ones, such as the number of visits, the number of pages visited on your site, the time a visitor spends browsing your site, and the bounce rate .

- In addition to the percentage of new traffic, the devices that visitors use, and the countries and websites they come from. But if you want more data and details, go to your Google Analytics account to get detailed data .

- We've reviewed how to connect a WordPress site with Google Analytics without the need to write any code or technical knowledge. You can now follow your site statistics directly from the dashboard to measure site indicators and ensure that you are heading in the right direction.

- Remember that adding Google Analytics to WordPress is not an end in itself, but rather a means to the primary goal, which is to improve the site and drive more traffic or increase sales. So it is important that you have a clear and detailed plan for promoting your site.